El menú, once, y ensalada

We're slowly adjusting to the way they do things here in Chile, but we aren't yet on quite the right schedule for meals.  Chilenos generally eat the main meal of the day in the early afternoon.  Many restaurants here in Santiago serve only a handful of daily specials around that time, which the call 'el menú del día', or the menu of the day.  In the late evening they have 'once' (own-say, literally eleven, meaning 11pm), which is a sort of bedtime snack. [Update:  the meal 'once' does not get its name from 11pm.  Its etymology is disputed; it might derive from 11am, but there are several more interesting stories of how the term came to be.  If you read Spanish, the details are here.]

This is cool except that old habits die hard, and we gringos just don't think about eating a big meal at 2pm.  And if you go out on the street looking for lunch at noon, or dinner at 6pm, they can be hard to find.

This was the mistake we made tonight, heading out at about 6 to a restaurant that Lojo had seen during the day that advertised healthy-looking salads.  Here's the sign -- I'm not sure what that red stuff is, but "salad prepared to your taste" sounded good...

Hmmm, salad...

Turns out, not surprisingly, they don't serve salads at night.  At night this particular place turns into a drinking establishment, with typical drinking establishment food.  So, our 'salad' became this:

Can you spot the little hot dog pieces?

Yes, that's french fries with some sort of shredded beef and onions, topped off with a couple fried eggs, and some sliced hot dog for added protein.  The four of us couldn't quite finish it!